


roots we grew down deep

by roundabout



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron) Lives, Fix-It, Gen, Reunions, Voltron: Legendary Defender Season/Series 08 Fix-It, embedded art
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:00:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22352221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roundabout/pseuds/roundabout
Summary: The lions return on a Wednesday.
Relationships: Allura & Coran (Voltron)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15
Collections: Allura Lives Zine, trust me: we'll all get out of this alive (an allura lives collection)





	roots we grew down deep

**Author's Note:**

> As soon as season 8 ended, I knew I wanted to write something like this fic. 
> 
> Luckily for me, the Allura Lives charity zine project gave me not only the opportunity to work on something I felt very passionate about, it connected me with [Lyss](https://lyssartandstars.tumblr.com/) (who created the gorgeous art for this piece), allowed me to work with some other incredible people, and give back, in a small way, to women and young girls through the Gyrl Wonder charity. 
> 
> I'd like to thank Ember, Kelsey, and Jess for cheerleading and beta-ing. And I'd like to give a very special thank you to Foxy, without you this piece never would have seen the light of day in the first place.

Beloved I come to tell you it is Spring!  
The old brown earth puts forth pale buds again;  
Pierced by the silver arrows of the rain  
Her wounded breasts bleed blossoms  
~ _The Victory Of Love_ , Olive Custance

Time on Earth moves strangely. 

Seconds drip past like molasses, dragging and slow. Each one seems to stretch on and on before it melts quickly into the next. A fat, mechanical clock – an old, archaic looking thing – tick-tick-ticks off-beat with the noisy human heartbeat monitor that stands sentry over the hospital room. 

The desert sun hammers down, beating through the glass window to lay hot against the nape of Coran’s neck. The heartbeat monitor beeps. The clock ticks. The muffled strains of hushed conversations filter through the door at uneven intervals. Coran blinks, once, twice, then rolls out his stiff shoulders. Shadows begin to stretch, long and strange where the artificial light bleeds into the dappled evening sunlight that spills into the room. 

Allura lies, very still and very quiet, on crisp, clean white sheets. Time drags on. 

When Coran sighs, his whole chest heaves. The ragged armchair creaks as he shifts his weight. He cradles her thin, fine-boned palm between two of his own and thinks of the way her smile had looked, sallow and wan under the then-foreign halogen lights. Coran traces the familiar furrows of her palm like each unchanging crease is a lifeline. 

“My father…” Allura had said, once – a lifetime ago, while they were still reeling from the aftermath of the entity’s dark presence. They had sat, alone together, in the dead of Atlas’s night cycle, listening to the rattle and the hum of the engines and life support systems keeping the crew alive. In the deceptive calm of the Before, still shaky from a dream she refused to put into words, Allura’s fingers had clutched Coran’s with surprising strength. “He once told me that royalty–”

She had paused then. Wrinkled her nose and shook her head as though she was shaking something loose. A calloused thumb swept across the back of Coran’s hand. “That _leadership_ ,” she corrected, “often involves taking personal risks and making personal sacrifices for the good of your people.”

Her eyes had been unyielding, piercing, despite the pain and darkness that lingered in their corners. “I must do this,” she had insisted, squeezing their conjoined hands over the yawning gulf between his chair and her pristine white sheets as if for emphasis. “For the good of my people.”

The engines had hummed away, filling the silence that fell, heavy and sick, between them. Allura’s hands, cool and dry and calloused in Coran’s own, went slack when he gathered them up and brought her knuckles to his own chapped mouth.

“What your people need most,” he had told her, very gently, very quietly, “is _you_.”

—

The Lions returned on a Wednesday.

They split the sky at sundown. Slipping past all forms of radar, they remained undetected until they had broken atmo and sunk fast. Five streaks of heat and light bore down on the Garrison grounds and set off every single warning light, alarm, and klaxon on base. The lions flew in a tight, familiar formation; one made awkward not on the merit of being unmanned, but by the fact that their vee was unbalanced. Black’s massive, hulking body listed off-center, weighing down their right wing. 

They landed on the vast, flat training ground, kicking up clouds of fine dust on impact that hung around their feet like fresh mist. Blue, settled uncharacteristically front and center, shifted her weight down onto her belly, limbs folding up tight while the others stood tall, standing guard, around her. Her maw split open, chin cutting down into the dirt, and Allura spilled out like water.

She looked worse for wear in her scuffed battle armour, her hair sweaty and tangled, face ashy and wane, but she was smiling. She was smiling, standing tall and vibrant and unrepentantly alive. A victorious glow seemed to hang about her, a brilliance that seared its way through Coran’s skin and into his veins as his blood caught fire with the force of his relief. She turned, surveying the growing crowd scattered across the grounds in front of her — a diverse mix of Garrison personnel and Galra Blades, Rebels and Altean survivors — and she tipped her head back and laughed.

Allura caught Coran’s eye through the haze of dust and the pulse of the crowd and, grinning with all of her teeth, tapped four splayed fingers to the hollow of her throat. He mirrored the action with shaking hands, answering a long forgotten call and response: victor to victor, survivor to survivor. Family to family.

[ ](https://lyssartandstars.tumblr.com/post/190389864947/hey-yall-im-finally-able-to-post-the-piece-i)

Something hard-fought and proud shone through Allura’s expression; her lips curled as though she could taste victory like blood on all her teeth. In the liminal light of the setting sun, she was painfully real, achingly tangible, and when she took three steps forward and collapsed into the reaching arms of her Paladins, the lions threw their heads back and roared. 

The sound was pure, unadulterated triumph. Its rumble shook the ground, reverberating up through Coran’s legs and into the barrel of his chest. It settled there, a lingering kind of magic, thrumming beneath his fingertips. 

Allura was whisked away in a burst of noise and havoc, all panicked shouts and barked orders as the medical team mobilized in the midst of the chaos to cut a swath through the gathering crowd. Her silver hair spilled in a loose wave off the edge of their clunky, wheeled stretcher, swaying in the clean evening wind rolling in over the sands. 

Coran watched her, pressing up onto his toes and shouldering his way through stunned officers with his whole body buzzing, until she disappeared into the crush of personnel on the ground. 

—

Despite her carefully trained and carefully bred royal disposition, Allura has never been a graceful sleeper. As a child, she was all sharp angles: mouth open, arms akimbo. It’s a trait she has never quite grown out of. She has always been ungainly in unconsciousness, present and accounted for, unapologetically taking up every available inch of free space.

By the time Wednesday has come and gone and come again, Coran has the urge to shake her in her neat little hospital cot, to nudge her knees and elbows until her sleeping form is sprawled and recognizable. Her pulse is steady and strong under Coran’s fingertips, matching the blasted rhythmic beep of the monitor, but her body is too still, too static for comfort. 

Instead, he watches the rise and fall of her chest and feels the steady bump-ba-bump of her heartbeat against the tips of his fingers, and thinks about all the things he wants to tell her when she wakes up.

“Altea is beautiful,” he’ll tell her. “Barren, but beautiful. The air even smells the same. We’re rebuilding, just a little at a time, but it hasn’t been the same without—”

“The juniberries are in bloom,” he’ll tell her. “Fields and fields of them. They sprawl out in the space where the castle once was, almost like a memorial—"

"Life has been most strange," he'll tell her. "The energy of the universe... well it’s almost as if it has been holding its breath, waiting for something, waiting for—"

The fine crease between Allura’s brows appears, briefly, before smoothing out. Her chin drops, until her mouth parts just enough for air to pass through her lips. Her head, set straight and perfect on her pristine pillow, tilts a scant few degrees to one side. 

Her strong, steady pulse beat-beat-beats under Coran’s fingers. The setting sun paints her skin rich ochre, vibrant golds and reds that fade into the faint, glowing pink of her cheek markings. Coran’s thumb sweeps over the bones of her wrist, and her nose, ever so faintly, wrinkles.

“You know,” Lance tells him, slipping into the room to set a nutrient bar and a bottle of water on the small round table at Coran’s elbow. The mice scurry down the line of Lance’s arm and up Coran’s, settling and nesting in Coran’s hair and on his shoulder. “You can step out and rest. She’s going to be alright. ”

A grin curls at the corners of Coran’s mouth. He doesn’t budge.

“I know.”

—

Power sits just underneath the surface of Allura’s skin. In a way it always has – part and parcel of her lineage – but there is the sense of something fresh, something growing, lingering all around her that wasn’t there before. A vibrating layer of new magic that creeps, invisible, through her veins and spreads from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. This new energy is different from the cool, rippling quintessence that had once slicked her aura like a second skin. Instead, it is bright and crisp and hungry, a wild thing ready to burst forth at the twitch of a finger.

Coran watches the play of the pre-dawn light across the planes of her face and presses his fingers to her pulse and thinks of old, burnt forests. Blackened trunks that stretch up into the sky with the tips of their old limbs sporting fresh green buds as new, verdant growth crawls along the floor. Tender vines spreading out and swallowing up the barren, scorched earth. 

Allura has the power of creation humming in the cage of her body, the threads of the universe knit into her flesh and bone. But her face, despite the raw power and the unsteady, uncertain passage of Earth’s time, looks the same as it did the day she left. Full cheeks, sharp nose, tired smudges of darkness under the pale fan of her lashes. Haloed in her sprawl of curls, she is tangible and familiar.

Her brows furrow and her mouth twitches, and now, when Wednesday has come and gone and come and gone, Allura wakes with little fanfare. Her toes flex and bunch, and the hospital cot clunks and groans as she shifts her weight. Her jaw cracks when it opens with a yawn. Allura’s fingers twitch against Coran’s palm and her eyes crack open.

It takes her bright eyes a moment to focus, but when they fall on Coran, her face splits with a magnificent grin. Coran can’t help but join her as his vision blurs. He leans forward, very carefully, and cups her palm between two of his own. His breath puffs hot against her cool, slender fingers when he brings them to his mouth. 

Very gently, very quietly, he tells her, “Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell with me on  
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/aroundab00t)  
> [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/roundabout)  
> [tumblr](http://roundab00t.tumblr.com)
> 
> You can find Lyss on  
> [insta](https://www.instagram.com/lyssartandstars/)  
> [tumblr](https://lyssartandstars.tumblr.com/)


End file.
